I should've known Alex wasn't feeling well when he spent over an hour the other night at my mom's house shelling edamame beans while we waited for the pizza to be delivered. He wasn't eating them (they're GREEN, give me a break), but he was perfectly content to sit still and peel them instead of running around the house raising hell like he usually does. I just thought he was tired.
He fell asleep in the car on the way home and I was looking forward to finally getting some sleep myself. Sister seems finally be sleeping in three hour (instead of one or two hour) stretches, so I was NOT PLEASED to be awakened at 1AM by my other child, the one who usually sleeps through the night. Then he coughed and I smelled barf and my body jerked immediately into SUPER ACTION MOM MODE.
Barf was EVERYWHERE. I did no less then four loads of laundry before the day was over. Dave crawled around everywhere trying to get it off the carpet. And poor Alex, he tried his best to make it to the toilet and was mostly successful. We took a shower together until the hot water went out after only ten minutes and I had to dry off and dress his poor little shivering body! That's what I get for being so quick to throw his sheets in the washing machine. I just didn't want them touching the floor or any of the other dirty laundry.
We finally got him back to bed after about an hour and he didn't get sick again until morning and at which point he made it into the infamous "barf bucket," a term he found HILARIOUS, even in his barfy sickboy state. And he pronounced it "berf," which I found hilarious. He made it all the way through the next day drinking only Pedialyte (which he called "gummy worm juice") only to berf it up on the carpet right after Dave got home from work. Let's just say the bickering I was complaining about? Has not gotten any better.
I kept thinking about all the people we'd potentially infected: Alex's twin friends and their mom and their five month-old baby sister, with whom we'd spent the entire afternoon at their house; my mom, who was flying to LA the next morning for her first ever employment conference; my uncle, who was on his way to take care of my sick grandmother while my mom was gone; my sister, who has a major vomit phobia and had to fly back to college in Connecticut today; Jeffrey (a family friend), with whom I shared a piece of pizza for gods sake and who had to fly back to college the next day as well. The list went on and on. (Fortunately, as far as I know, no one got sick. Norovirus is really only contagious if you're around the vomit or the contaminated food itself. There really is no such thing as "stomach flu", it's literally always food poisoning.)
He's fine today, thank god and so far none of the rest of us are sick. My guess is he ate something bad at preschool on Tuesday.
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